Charter School Success Story

In my youth, cheerleaders had a chant that went, “S-u-c-c-e-s-s, that’s the way you spell success.” I don’t know that you would hear that battle cry anymore, because not many public schools teach spelling. One that does has worked the word success into its title, appropriately, as it turns out.

The Success Academy opened in Harlem in 2006 with 160 students. It is now a chain of charter schools (32) with an enrollment of 9,000. It is also in the top one percent in the state of New York in math. History, science and literature also figure prominently in the schools’ curricula and students also learn how to play chess in their free time.

So, naturally, the mayor of New York and the teachers’ unions would like to close the schools down, and nearly did shut down three of them until thousands of parents protested.  “I wasn’t such a libertarian before I got into government but since I have been, my libertarian instincts have come out,” Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz said on Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

“Public education will make a libertarian out of anyone,” AEI resident scholar Frederick M. Hess, who hosted the event Moskowitz spoke at, said sympathetically.

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